Brilliant! I'm fatally allergic to peanuts and seafood, so this is something I planned to train but wasn't sure how to start. This step-by-step overview is fantastic, thank you so much!
Aw man when ever I encounter someone with a nut allergy what pops up in my mind is how much that would suck if that were me. Peanut butter is so delicious. Well, I’ll eat the PB&J, peanut butter and banana sandwich, and ants on a log in your honor. Stay safe out there. Food allergies are no joke.
This was very helpful. I have developed some severe allergies over the last year (potatoes of all things) and now I am considering adding allergy detection to my SDiT's training. The biggest hurdle is I am extremely allergic to these things and can't have them in the house, so I am not sure that I can owner-train her to detect them myself. Since she is still only a puppy, I figure I have other things to focus on and I will cross that training bridge when I get there. Thank you, Laura.
My husband and I were talking about potato allergies a couple weeks ago. We looked it up online and it said this is rare. It’s ironic that I find someone in the comment section with this allergy.
Great job, Jackie and Chai! I never thought about how if an allergen detection dog alerts by touching their owner, they may pass along the allergen! Thank you for sharing all your wisdom. This was a fascinating topic for this non-scent trained service dog team.
This is a big reason I got into dog training. I have a goal to train an allergy detection dog but not sure where to start. Would love very detail specific training on how to do this.
I don’t personally have experience training for that outside of dogs who naturally alert. But I believe Feywild dogs has a course on this that might be helpful!
I went to a service dog training private university with a classmate that couldn’t smell anything. We wanted to train a dog for her to sniff out spoiled food.
This is super helpful! Im going to start scent training for my peanut allergy soon for my pup. I love the foundation ideas i can start working on now before adding a peanut scent.
This is very interesting. I always wondered how they were able to train the dogs not to eat the food they were sniffing like if it was at a restaurant or on the floor
I have a video over on Patreon that shows how I teach them to ignore dropped food (which is typically part of a Public Access Test). www.patreon.com/posts/leave-it-and-for-72110249
I was so excited to see this as I am getting a service dog prospect for just this application. I have a tree nut allergy and while I have not required an epi pen, I try to avoid the symptom of projectile vomiting at all costs. Since tree nuts come in different varieties and forms (as in almond milk, cashew butter, etc) does the dog need to be trained to each kind of nut that falls under tree nuts? Thanks for posting this, it made my day.
Hey Armadillo Feathers! I’m glad you enjoyed the video! I’m guessing the answer is yes, but I don’t know for sure. I brought Jackie on because I don’t know too much about allergen detection, so I would check out her business, linked in the description, as well as delta tails. They may be able to better answer that question more accurately! If I get a lot of questions, I may group them together and try to get them all answered over on Patreon :)
Is it possible to train a dog to alert to smells in the air, e.g. 2nd hand cigarette smoke, and indicate to the severely allergic handler which direction it's coming from? That's something I've always wondered about. I knew it was possible to do foods/other objects, but wasn't sure about scents in the air and their direction of travel.
I got lucky, my doctor and I discovered I had diabetes. We started meds right away. I also went on a diet that besides losing weight, it was also to drop my A1C. I have a service dog that picks up stuff and helps me stand when needed. So I was thinking on how to train him to sense when my levels were to high or to low. I didn’t have to worry about training him. His bonded girlfriend knew when I went to high or low. She would lay on me when I was in trouble. Now that I’m not worried about being a diabetic and I’ve kept on the weight loss. She still sticks by me at home and I didn’t have to worry about working with two service dogs. The fun part is we got her at the end of my service dog training and she just worked with him and learned how to be a good service dog but not the special training that Ryu went through. The only one going training she still gets is her down training. She is short enough that when all the other dogs lay down, they become eye to eye with her. So she thought she just sat there and was in a correct position. Well, she ended up learning down on the bed so she was eye to eye with us in bed. She does down on the couch now. Hoping she catch’s on when she is on the floor. But at home she snuggles with me and is a great dog.
This is amazing!! If my dog wasn't so bad at sniffing out even her own food and treats, I would absolutely be looking into training her to detect my food allergens (peanuts and multiple types of tree nuts) T_T
Dogs who don't need to sniff for food, are not naturally gonna sniff for it. You gotta start doing scent games and teaching them to sniff (through shaping) for a scent. There are probably tutorials online for scent games.
@@ellabartal4652 Thank you for the advice, but I've been doing this and trying out all kinds of scent games with her for over a year and a half. Every other cue and trick and game I've taught her she's picked up quickly with no problem but she is just not good at finding food by scent even if she is excited and actively looking for it; more often than not, I have to end up guiding her to food she is literally standing on top of because she just can't seem to latch onto a scent trail. Anyone who has fed her treats has noted this as well. lol
Would this approach work for medical alert scents as well?? My sd has learned to false alert for food sometimes unfortunately, although it’s lessening, and he’s learning that false alerts don’t get him food, would these be good steps to go to to really make sure he is alerting accurately and understanding what he’s doing?
this might be a stupid question to ask, but is it possible to train a dog to detect eggs? i’m very allergic to them (i require an epi-pen at least 7 times out of 10 if is accidents ingest even the tiniest bit), but i’m not sure if that’s a thing that can be trained (safely). i’m also allergic to all seafood as well as lentils, but not as much as i am to eggs (i think😅)
Hey Jaelyn - I don't know the answer to that question, as I"m not a specialist in scent detection. However, it seems like this may be a task better addressed with technology vs. a dog. But again, I don't know anything about UV allergies, so I would speak with a trainer who has more experience in that realm.
How would you get the allergen for beginning scent work? Latex i assume i could use pieces of latex gloves but bananas/pineapples/melons have it too. Is there an allergen isolate you could purchase for this?
Hey Hanad! I'm not a scent training expert (which is why I had someone on to talk about it), so I'm not sure the answer to this question. I'd check out the resources I linked below and book an appointment to see if they can address this question for you. I'm not fully sure I understand the question, or know enough about latex allergies to answer.
If you train the pup to detect more then one allergy do they do a different motion “aka lay down “ for each allergy? Or can just one motion work since it’s to find an allergy you want to avoid?
Do you have to have your dog trained and verified by an ADI accredited organization or charity in order for your dog to be a service dog? I am self-training mine and unable to find an ADI accredited organization that will work with me because they don’t typically train people’s dogs, they just give people dogs they already have trained.
You do not need to have your dog verified by an ADI organization. If you travel outside the US, ADI accreditation can be really helpful, but it is definitely not required within the US. Here's a video that might be helpful in thinking through your training timeline, goals, and testing if you're looking for a more structured approach to training your SD: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3T8Ej_UEK0Y.html
LOL yeah - I taught Whip that trick a few years ago. It was one of the hardest ones I've trained! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-l6eK9M9V1Ss.html I actually have a bit of a breakdown/behind the scenes of how I trained it over on Patreon too!
Hi Maureen. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the video. Jackie and I worked really hard on it. Perhaps turning on the captions would be helpful to clarify the audio? I re-watched the video and there are no verbals to any of the sessions that were covered or missed. There's one point where Jackie praises Chai that overlaps with our talking, but that's about it, so I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to specifically.
@@DoggyU I DID an enjoy the video - as always terrific useful info for trainers! I just wanted to hear what you were saying over any technical issues. Please keep doing these in depth training session across the service dog spectrum. MW
...maybe it's something playing on your browser at home? There's no audio overlap happening on my browser in watching this video; conversation is coming through loud and clear. Could also be an issue with RU-vid uploading, since you caught the video almost the second that it launched. Sometimes the first few minutes have weird bugs that go away upon a rewatch.
I don’t personally use them for training. I do have a Garmin GPS that was an e-collar but I took the prongs off and trained a positive reinforcement recall to the tone. You can find a video about that if you search my channel for “gps”
